My colleague David Downey and I just wrote about how all five members of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors are white males, even though the county is nearly half Latino. Three incumbent white male supervisors defeated their Latino opponents on Tuesday.

There are a number of reasons for that, including the difficulty of a challenger of any ethnicity defeating an incumbent supervisor.

But the election results also reflect how Latino political power – although on the rise – continues to fall far short of its potential, in the Inland area and nationwide.

Latinos comprise 46.5 percent of Riverside County’s population. But even in a good year for Latino-voter turnout, fewer than 1 in 4 people who actually vote are Latino, according to an analysis by the California Civic Engagement Project at the UC Davis Center for Regional Change.

One reason is that a disproportionate number of Latinos are non-citizens, either because they’re undocumented or are only legal U.S. residents (you have to be a citizen to vote).

In addition, Latino citizens are on average younger than non-Hispanic citizens. Younger people of all ethnicities are less likely to vote than older people. And many Latinos are not yet 18.

But even among voting-eligible citizens, the registration rate is lower for Latinos than for non-Latinos. And Latino registered voters are less likely to vote than non-Latino registered voters.

Latino turnout is worst in primaries in non-presidential election years, such as Tuesday and in June 2010. The electorate is whiter, older and wealthier, Mindy Romero, director of the civic-engagement project, told me.

“The primary voters don’t represent the rest of the state, and they don’t even represent registered voters,” Romero said.

In the 2010 primary, a mere 11.3 percent of Latinos eligible to vote actually did so, according to estimates by the civic-engagement project. That compares with 24.1 percent of voters overall.

Groups such as the Latino Voter Registration Project in Riverside and Mi Familia Vota, a six-state Latino voter-registration effort, work to register Inland Latinos to vote and to then get them to fill out their mail-in ballots or go to the polls on Election Day.

But they face big obstacles. One is that most political campaigns focus their limited resources on getting regular voters to the polls rather than turning non-voters into voters and irregular voters into reliable ones, said Arnulfo De La Cruz, California director of Mi Familia Vota. That’s especially true during low-turnout primaries, he said.

Rachel Lopez of Jurupa Valley made voter-outreach phone calls for Mi Familia Vota last month. She talked to people about how local elections in non-presidential election years make a huge difference in policy and funding for education and other matters that polls show Latinos care about.

Some told her they’d try to vote, but others gave reasons why they wouldn’t.

“Some of them said, ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘They don’t care what we think’ or ‘They’re all crooked’ or ‘I don’t trust them,’” Lopez said.

A number of voters told Lopez they “thought the election for president was more important.”

But even in presidential election years, Latino turnout lags far behind that of non-Latinos.

In the November 2012 elections, which included the presidential race, only 32.2 percent of Latinos in Riverside County eligible to vote did so, according to a civic-engagement project analysis. That compares with 50.8 percent of non-Hispanics.

The gap was similar in San Bernardino County: 34.2 percent turnout for voting-eligible Latinos versus 52.8 percent for non-Hispanics.

There’s no doubt that Latino political clout is growing in the Inland Empire and nationwide. Latino population growth has far outpaced that of non-Hispanics over the past few decades. That’s led to Latinos becoming a bigger and bigger share of the electorate. But a lot of Latinos’ potential political power in Riverside and San Bernardino counties is still untapped.

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